Armenia’s prime minister, Nikol Pashinyan, has signed a “painful” deal with the leaders of Azerbaijan and Russia to end the military conflict over the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region after more than a month of bloodshed.
The declaration on Tuesday morning follows six weeks of heavy fighting in which Azerbaijan’s forces advanced steadily into the enclave. Officials in Baku, the Azerbaijan capital, said on Monday it had seized dozens more settlements in Nagorno-Karabakh, a day after proclaiming victory in the battle for the enclave’s strategically positioned second-largest city, Shusha.
“I made that decisionbased on the deep analyses of the combat situation and in discussion with best experts of the field,” Pashinyan said on social media early on Tuesday morning.
“This is not a victory but there is not defeat until you consider yourself defeated. We will never consider ourselves defeated and this shall become a new start of an era of our national unity and rebirth.”
As thousands of people fled Nagorno-Karabakh for Armenia as the fighting intensified, Pashinyan said the decision was “unbelievably painful for me and my people”.
He said the agreement would take effect from 1am on Tuesday (2100 GMT on Monday), ending six weeks of fierce clashes over the disputed region that have left hundreds dead.
Q&A
Why are Armenia and Azerbaijan fighting over the Nagorno-Karabakh region?
Early on Sunday 27 September, Armenia announced it was declaring martial law, mobilising its army and ordering civilians to shelter. It claimed its neighbour Azerbaijan had launched a military operation inside a breakaway region called Nagorno-Karabakh. Azerbaijan said it attacked only in response to Armenian shelling.
Nagorno-Karabakh is recognised internationally as Azerbaijan’s territory but has a mostly Armenian population who have resisted Azerbaijani rule for more than a century. In 1991 the region of around 150,000 people declared independence and since then it has ruled itself – with Armenian support – as the unrecognised Republic of Artsakh.
Nagorno-Karabakh, a mountainous, landlocked region inside the borders of Azerbaijan, has been a source of dispute since before the creation of the Soviet Union. Tensions were suppressed when both Armenia and Azerbaijan were Soviet states, but they re-emerged as the cold war ended and Communist party control of the bloc dissolved.
A war between Armenian and Azerbaijani forces ended in a ceasefire in 1994, with Armenia in full control of Nagorno-Karabakh and other surrounding enclaves of Azerbaijan’s territory. Azerbaijan is majority Muslim and Armenia is majority Christian, and some elements on both sides seek to cast the conflict in religious terms.
Michael Safi
He said the agreement was “the best possible solution to the current situation”.
Azerbaijan’s president, Ilham Aliyev, later confirmed the news in a televised online meeting with Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin.
“The signed trilateral statement will become a (crucial) point in the settlement of the conflict,” Aliyev said.
Putin said in a statement on Tuesday that he will deploy peace keepers along the front line in Nagorno-Karabakh following the agreement to stop fighting. He said he hoped the deal “will set up necessary conditions for long-lasting and full-scale settlement of the crisis over Nagorno-Karabakh”.
Arayik Harutyunyan, the leader of the Nagorno-Karabakh region, said on Facebook that he gave agreement “to end the war as soon as possible”.
Earlier, Azerbaijan said that its forces shot down a Russian military helicopter as it flew over Armenia. The incident happened about 70km (45 miles) away from Nagorno-Karabakh, but Azerbaijan said the war there was a contributing factor.
Fighting over Nagorno-Karabakh broke out on 27 September. The region has been under the control of ethnic Armenian forces backed by Armenia since 1994.
The fighting has raised fears of a wider regional war, with Turkey supporting its ally Azerbaijan, while Russia has a defence pact with Armenia and a military base there.
Azerbaijan said on Sunday it had captured Shusha, known by Armenians as Shushi, which sits on a mountaintop overlooking Stepanakert, the city regarded as the enclave’s capital by its ethnic Armenian administration.
Shushi’s position just 10km (six miles) from Stepanakert gives strategic advantage to whoever holds it. The city also lies along the main road connecting Stepanakert with Armenia. Long lines of vehicles jammed the territory’s main road on Sunday as Nagorno-Karabakh residents fled the fighting into Armenia.
“Unfortunately, we are forced to admit that a series of failures still haunt us, and the city of Shushi is completely out of our control,” Vagram Pogosian, a spokesman for the president of the government in Nagorno-Karabakh, said in a statement on Facebook. “The enemy is on the outskirts of Stepanakert.”
Azerbaijan said it had retaken much of the land in and around Nagorno-Karabakh that it lost in a 1991-94 war over the territory which killed an estimated 30,000 people and forced many more from their homes. Armenia has denied the extent of Azerbaijan’s territorial gains.
Reuters and Associated Press contributed to this report.